The Third amendment to BS 7671:2008, The IET Wiring Regulations, became effective on this date. Following this, contractors have a six month transition period to get up to speed with the changes and can design, install and certify to either the new or previous standard.

If you want to find out more information about BS7671 Amendment 3 then take a look at the following factsheet we found online, it gives you all the details :-

A new electrical training centre has opened in East Anglia with the backing of a £100,000 charitable effort. Building services charity JTL will run its own training centre on Bowthorpe Industrial Estate after the official opening with the Lord Mayor of Norwich, councillor Judith Lubbock, on Friday March 27.

The JTL was founded in 1990 as a collaboration between the Electrical Contractors Association and the union Unite, before becoming a charity in 2000 offering advanced apprenticeships and National Vocational Qualification (NVQ) assessments in the building services sector.

About 80pc of young people with JTL go on to complete their traineeships, compared to a national average of 60pc, said the charity.

Recruitment levels at JTL have, however, also been higher than the national average, which the charity attributes to a growing interest in apprenticeship careers as university loan debts exceed £30,000 and students are becoming keener to “earn while they learn”.

It has been reported that A Trojan is targeting firms in the energy industry, infiltrating systems in a bid to gather information about a company’s operations. The malware, discovered by researchers working at Symantec, found that most of the attacks involved victims in the petroleum, gas and helium industries, especially those based in the United Arab Emirates, which accounted for one in four attacks.

The group behind the attack does not seem to be particularly advanced, as they exploited an old vulnerability and used their attack to distribute well-known threats that are available in the underground market. However, many people still fail to apply patches for vulnerabilities that are several years old, leaving themselves open to attacks of this kind.

A new light bulb that’s made using graphene will go on sale later this year, according to its developers—and it’s said to be the first commercially viable consumer product to use the supermaterial.

The new bulb—developed by researchers at Manchester University where the material was discovered—uses a filament-shaped LED which is coated in graphene. The bulb, which is dimmable, is said to provide a brighter light than conventional LEDs, use up to 10 percent less energy and last longer, too. The Financial Times reports that the bulb could cost less than $20 when it goes on sale.

The bulb has been developed by a company called Graphene Lighting—of which Prof Colin Bailey, deputy vice-chancellor at the University of Manchester, is a director. “People are amazed at just how quickly we have managed to take it to market,” Bailey told the Financial Times. “Sometimes it takes 20 years to get a new discovery out there.”

It’s still difficult to make graphene in large qualities, which make items that use it in bulk incredibly expensive. This new lightbulb uses a small quanitiy, making it economcial to produce.

Wei Tang, assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering at New Mexico State University, is taking a cue from nature to devise the next generation of integrated low-power, wearable micro-devices.

The human brain inspired his approach in the novel design of a system of state-of-the-art miniaturized sensors that can detect, transmit and reliably process valuable data.

Wireless sensors already enjoy widespread use in health care, surveillance, smart buildings, disaster mitigation and environmental monitoring. But the expectation of next-generation devices is that they be small enough to wear on clothing, a hat or eyeglasses.

Tang plans to use current sensor technology using a new design strategy to construct better circuits to build a bridge between the human body and the environment. The broad goal of his work is to extend our ability to sense the world and better respond to the environment and to develop medical devices that can be used for rehabilitation or to prevent and detect disease.

“The challenge of designing wearable devices is to make sensors that require very, very low power consumption and have a very, very small circuit area,” Tang said.

“My idea is to learn from nature how our brains and bodies work,” Tang said. “Our brain is a kind of a circuit. It has some big differences if you can compare it to a computer. Our brain has some big advantages. Our brain runs at very low power and is quite compact. A computer is constantly running at a very fast speed and the battery may last only one day. They are also too large.”

Computer code represents information as groups of 1s and 0s, or bits. The information has different weights making it a hierarchical, weighted system. The human brain transmits information through a series of neurons, all of which have different functions, but all of which carry the same weight, making a non-weighted system. The frequency with which neurons transmit information in the brain varies, so that the body can determine different types of information.

“Our brain is an asynchronous non-weighted machine and a computer is a synchronous weighted machine,” Tang said. “This is what I learned from a neuron science class,” he added. “I think we can borrow from this idea to build our next-generation circuit.”

Synchronous devices, such as computers, are constantly running code and communicating, even if there is no information to be sent. As a result, they waste a lot of energy. But if one thinks about humans having a conversation, they don’t need to have processes constantly running to synchronize words. Tang proposes to replace synchronous devices with devices that work more efficiently, like the human brain.

“I think we can replace current radio devices that use synchronous information to use asynchronous information – that is the first part. We developed a radio device with small circuits. We want to demonstrate that this radio can communicate to another radio using very low power consumption,” Tang said.

“The next part is to process the information. We created a very small integrated circuit, 3 millimeters by 3 millimeters. After testing this device, we want to put it on a hat with a small battery to extract EEG brain wave information. A patient or someone could wear it for a day or even up to a week. It would provide doctors with information to analyze.”

An EEG, or electroencephalogram, is a test that measures and records the electrical activity of the brain. Sensors are attached to a patient’s head and hooked by wires to a computer that records the brain’s electrical activity and diagnoses problems such as epilepsy.

Because the power consumption of Tang’s sensor device is so low, he is planning to devise some sort of energy-harvesting device, using energy from vibrations or solar energy. That way, the sensor would no longer require a battery and would become power independent, Tang’s ultimate goal.

The application of this technology is broad, indeed. Tang has collaborated with two researchers from NMSU’s Biology Department.

Associate Professor Timothy Wright is using a hummingbird feeder that uses Radio-Frequency Identification to give birds access to the nectar. Tang’s group designed a controller, a detection mechanism to alert the feeder when a bird is near and data logging. The feeder was constructed by the College of Engineering’s Manufacturing and Technology Engineering Center. Wright’s group conducted research with the feeder in Costa Rica last year. The study relates the cognitive abilities of the birds to their ability to defend their territories.

In another study, Professor Graciela Unguez has been working with Tang to use his technology to assist in her study of electric fish that are able to produce weak electric fields and use this ability to sense their environment, choose a mate and identify members of their own species.
Tang is developing a tiny device that can be placed on the fish to collect data about their behavior.

This study is important to the future of using sensors that can reliably transmit information through water, leading the way for devices that can be implanted in the human body or submersed in water, or built into concrete structures for measuring mechanical stress, for instance.

“There are applications everywhere: industry, environmental, security, biomedical,” Tang said. “Everywhere we see the need for the next-generation computer that is miniature.”

All users of the IET Wiring Regulations need to be aware of the coming changes in Amendment No. 3 to the 17th Edition (BS 7671:2008+A3:2015). Potentially life-saving changes are proposed making this a vital update. These changes are expected to include (but are not limited to) amendments in the following areas: Consumer units (to come into effect January 2016) Wiring in escape routes Changes to earth fault loop impedances for all protective devices Updated EIC and EICR forms Changes to definitions throughout the Regulations Amendment No. 3 publishes on 5 January 2015 and comes into effect on 1 July 2015. All new installations from this point must comply with Amendment No. 3 to BS 7671:2008.

The following two books include details Amendment 3 to BS 7671:2008 and are well worth purchasing. Click the link below to buy from Amazon.

There was a warning back in November 2013 about the dangers of buying fake copy’s of the regulations. Well yet again more fake copy’s have been found recently and are still been sold in the UK, it was reported on a recent episode of the BBC program “Fake Britain”.

We found this list on-line today and it advises you which uses more energy in standby mode, a computer or a phone charger etc etc. There is some supprises in the list. This of cause is based on UK energy use and is in UK pounds.

The green electricity company has compiled a list of the worst household offenders and the results may come as a surprise to many of you.

We have found this article on the internet which we are sure will be of interest to many people working in the electrical trade. It explains whether adequate regulations exist for the securing of cables.